Promotion

Knockout gains big cast

Steven Soderbergh's Knockout film was sounding a lot like The Girlfriend Experience (Filmstalker review), and that's not a bad thing either. I don't mean for the story content, but for the fact that he was casting an expert at what the film is about rather than an actress, and for that film it worked really well.

With Knockout he's replicating that as he takes on the fighter Gina Carano for the lead role, but today we hear that he's adding in some big cast members to stand alongside her, and they're some big names as well as being good to great actors.

I wonder if Steven Soderbergh has learned from The Girlfriend Experience that he needs some strong acting talent in the film as well as the person who can really give the authentic feel of the lead character and what they do.

We also hear that there's a big change on the story front for Knockout, and the lead character, originally the film would have seen an underground fighter being recruited by special operations teams within certain agencies to work for them. Now that appears to have changed quite a bit and suggests that Gina Carano has revealed more acting ability than we first thought.

Her character will now be, and always will have been, from a strict military background and carrying an exemplary record. It's this that causes her to become a black ops soldier, something it would seem that she's been doing for some time when our story begins. Knockout will see her being double crossed during one of her missions by one of her own team members as she is set-up to take the fall for an operation going badly wrong. It's here where she starts to try and track down who did it, looking for revenge.

Words on roles tell us that Michael Douglas will be playing a government figure, Michael Fassbender will be one of Gina Carano's black ops team members, and Ewan McGregor will be playing the owner of a private military-type corporation that runs the black ops team. There's no word yet on what role Dennis Quaid will be playing.

I don't know about you, but this is sounding better and better as time goes on, and I'm really starting to get excited about it. Of course people might complain about the acting talents of Carano and if she can carry out her role, but does she need to deliver much more acting wise than a Bourne film?